Results of pollution study expected next year

State agency says cleanup ofEvergreen area will begin in 2008

The state hopes to begin removing a significant amount of underground contaminants from an Evergreen area during spring 2008.

The volume of pollutants, the method of removal and the cleanup costs will remain up in the air until roughly July.

That's when the Montana Department of Environmental Quality expects to finish studying the petroleum products and preservatives that have been soaking and oozing between Whitefish Stage Road and U.S. 2 for as long as 82 years. The lands are just north of the McElroy and Wilken Gravel Pit. It stretches east from Kalispell Pole and Timber Co. to the Office Max property on U.S. 2.

These lands have been listed as federal Superfund sites since the 1980s.

Montana officials briefed some Flathead County state legislators about the cleanup study Thursday.

The pollutants originated on parts of lands totaling almost 45 acres, which were the sites of the Yale Oil Refinery, Kalispell Pole and Timber, and Reliance Refinery.

The state Department of Environmental Quality identified seven entities that it is trying to hold responsible for the underground contamination, which occurred between 1924 and 1990. It filed a lawsuit in 2004 in state court, trying to make them help pay for the cleanup.

The seven are the state Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Exxon Mobil, Swank Enterprises, Klingler Lumber Co., Montana Mokko, Kalispell Pole and Timber and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad.

In 2005, the Department of Environmental Quality began a $1.25 million study to determine how far the subterranean pollutants have spread, their underground densities and what methods should be used to clean the ground. Until this study is complete, the state won't know how much cleanup money it will seek from those seven entities.

The state is tracking the pollutants with 94 shallow and deep monitoring wells, several other wells and numerous soil samples.

Experts are focusing on pentachlorophenol, a wood preservative. This chemical is the fastest-traveling pollutant among the contaminants dripped and leaked into the area's soil - and is the advance wave of subterranean contamination.

The studies provide an incomplete picture of the horizontal and vertical spread of pentachlorophenol, said Moriah Bucy, a DEQ environmental specialist.

If the concentration of pentachlorophenol is greater than one part per 1 billion parts of water, it exceeds federal drinking standards.

The aquifer in this area typically ranges from 20 feet deep at the top to 120 feet deep at the bottom.

Samples show that the pentachlorophenol concentrations greatly exceed drinking standards at the top of the aquifer east of Flathead Drive, west of Klingler Lumber Co. and north of the gravel pit.

Groundwater plumes with safe drinking concentrations of pentachlorophenol stretch - at 20-foot depths - to the northeast into a small residential area and east across U.S. 2.

Bucy does not expect dangerous densities of pentachlorophenol to remain in the small residential area west of the railroad tracks before ground water fix-it measures have been tackled.

Although the top of the aquifer beneath Lucky Lil's Casino and the Lucky Logger Casino - just east of U.S. 2 - doesn't appear to hold pentachlorophenol, the same aquifer at that spot at 120 feet deep has a pentachlorophenol concentration of 40 parts per billion.